The servant as leader

lift

/*£/

THE SERVANT AS LEADER

The Servant as Leader is the first of four essays on the role
of servant. The second is The Institution as Servant, followed
by Trustees as Servants, and Teacher as Servant (Paulist Press
1979).

This revision of the 1970 edition of The Servant as Leader is
the fruit of much helpful criticism, and more is welcomed. It
is offered again not as a final or complete statement, but as a
record of thinking in transition that is drawn more from
experience and searching than from scholarship .

Behind what is said here is a twofold concern: first for the
individual in society and his bent to deal with the massive
problems of our times wholly in terms of systems, ideologies,
and movements. These have their place, but they are not
basic because they do not make themselves. What is basic is
the incremental thrust of an individual who has the ability to
serve and lead.

My second concern is for the individual as a serving person
and his tendency to deny wholeness and creative fulfillment
for himself by failing to lead when he could lead.

Overarching these is a concern for the total process of
education and its seeming indifference to the individual as
servant and leader, as a person and in society, on the assump¬
tion that intellectual preparation favors his optimal growth in
these ways when, in fact, quite the reverse may be true.

Part of the problem is that serve and lead are overused
words with negative connotations. But they are also good
words and I can find no others that carry as well the meaning
I would like to convey. Not everything that is old and worn,
or even corrupt, can be thrown away. Some of it has to be
rebuilt and used again. So it is, it seems to me, with the
words serve and lead.

Robert K. Greenleaf

Theology Library

CLAREMONT
SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY
Claremont, CA

Published by

Robert K. Greenleaf Center
Copyright © 1970, 1973 by Robert K. Greenleaf
Distributed by
Robert K. Greenleaf Center
210 Herrick Road
Newton Center, MA 02159

SERVANT AND LEADER. Can these two roles be fused in one
real person, in all levels of status or calling? If so, can that person live
and be productive in the real world of the present? My sense of the
present leads me to say yes to both questions. This paper is an attempt
to explain why and to suggest how.

The idea of The Servant as Leader came out of reading Herman
Hesse’s Journey to the East . In this story we see a band of men on a myth¬
ical journey, probably also Hesse’s own journey. The central figure of
the story is Leo who accompanies the party as the servant who does their
menial chores, but who also sustains them with his spirit and his song.
He is a person of extraordinary presence. All goes well until Leo dis¬
appears. Then the group falls into disarray and the journey is abandoned.
They cannot make it without the servant Leo. The narrator, one of the
party, after some years of wandering finds Leo and is taken into the
Order that had sponsored the journey. There he discovers that Leo,
whom he had known first as servant , was in fact the titular head of the
Order, its guiding spirit, a great and noble leader.

One can muse on what Hesse was trying to say when he wrote
this story. We know that most of his fiction was autobiographical, that
he led a tortured life, and that Journey to the East suggests, a turn toward
the serenity he achieved in his old age. There has been much speculation

1

by critics on Hesse’s life and work, some of it centering on this story
which they find the most puzzling. But to me, this story clearly says —
the great leader is seen as servant first, and that simple fact is the key
to his greatness. Leo was actually the leader all of the time, but he was
servant first because that was what he was, deep down inside. Leader¬
ship was bestowed upon a man who was by nature a servant. It was some¬
thing given, or assumed, that could be taken away. His servant nature
was the real man, not bestowed, not assumed, and not to be taken away.
He was servant first.

I mention Hesse and Journey to the East for two reasons: first to
acknowledge the source of the idea of The Servant as header. Then I
want to use this reference as an introduction to a brief discussion of
prophecy.

Fifteen years ago when I first read about Leo, if I had been
listening to contemporary prophecy as intently as I do now, the first
draft of this piece might have been written then. As it was, the idea
lay dormant for eleven years until, four years ago, I concluded that we
in this country were in a leadership crisis and that I should do what I
could about it. I became painfully aware of how dull my sense of con¬
temporary prophecy had been. And I have reflected much on why we do
not hear and heed the prophetic voices in our midst (not a new question
in our times, nor more critical than heretofore) .

I now embrace the theory of prophecy which holds that prophetic
voices of great clarity, and with a quality of insight equal to that of
any age, are speaking cogently all of the time. Men and women of a
stature equal to the greatest of the past are with us now addressing the
problems of the day and pointing to a better way and to a personeity
better able to live fully and serenely in these times.

The variable that marks some periods as barren and some as rich
in prophetic vision is in the interest, the level of seeking, the responsive¬
ness of the hearers. The variable is not in the presence or absence or the
relative quality and force of the prophetic voices. The prophet grows
in stature as people respond to his message. If his early attempts are
ignored or spurned, his talent may wither away.

It is seekers, then, who make the prophet; and the initiative of any

2

one of us in searching for and responding to the voice of a contemporary
prophet may mark the turning point in his growth and service. But
since we are the product of our own history, we see current prophecy
within the context of past wisdom. We listen to as wide a range of
contemporary thought as we can attend to. Then we choose those we
elect to heed as prophets — both old and new — and meld their advice
with our own leadings. This we test in real-life experiences to establish
our own position.

Some who have difficulty with this theory assert that their faith
rests on one or more of the prophets of old having given the "word
for all time and that the contemporary ones do not speak to their con¬
dition as the older ones do. But if one really believes that the "word
has been given for all time, how can one be a seeker? How can one hear
the contemporary voice when one has decided not to live in the present
and has turned him off ?

Neither this hypothesis nor its opposite can be proved. But I submit
that the one given here is the more hopeful choice, one that offers a
significant role in prophecy to every individual. One cannot interact
with and build strength in a dead prophet, but he can do it with a living
one. "Faith," Dean Inge has said, "is the choice of the nobler hypothesis."

One does not, of course, ignore the great voices of the past. One
does not awake each morning with the compulsion to reinvent the wheel.
But if one is servant , either leader or follower, one is always searching,
listening, expecting that a better wheel for these times is in the making.
It may emerge any day. Any one of us may find it out of his own ex¬
perience. I am hopeful.

I am hopeful for these times, despite the tension and conflict, be¬
cause more natural servants are trying to see clearly the world as it is
and are listening carefully to prophetic voices that are speaking now.
They are challenging the pervasive injustice with greater force and
they are taking sharper issue with the wide disparity between the quality
of society they know is reasonable and possible with available resources,
and, on the other hand, the actual performance of the whole range of
institutions that exist to serve society.

A fresh critical look is being taken at the issues of power and
authority, and people are beginning to learn, however haltingly, to

3

relate to one another in less coercive and more creatively supporting ways.
A new moral principle is emerging which holds that the only authority
deserving one’s allegiance is that which is freely and knowingly granted
by the led to the leader in response to, and in proportion to, the clearly
evident servant stature of the leader. Those who choose to follow this
principle will not casually accept the authority of existing institutions.
Rather, they will freely respond only to individuals who are chosen as
leaders because they are proven and trusted as servants. To the extent
that this principle prevails in the future, the only truly viable institutions
will be those that are predominantly servant-led.

I am mindful of the long road ahead before these trends, which I
see so clearly, become a major society-shaping force. We are not there
yet. But I see encouraging movement on the horizon.

What direction will the movement take? Much depends on whether
those who stir the ferment will come to grips with the age-old problem
of how to live in a human society. I say this because so many, having
made their awesome decision for autonomy and independence from
tradition, and having taken their firm stand against injustice and hypoc-
risy, find it hard to convert themselves into affirmative builders of a
better society. How many of them will seek their personal fulfillment
by making the hard choices, and by undertaking the rigorous preparation
that building a better society requires? It all depends on what kind of
leaders emerge and how they — we — respond to them.

My thesis, that more servants should emerge as leaders, or should
follow only servant-leaders, is not a popular one. It is much more com¬
fortable to go with a less demanding point of view about what is expected
of one now. There are several undemanding, plausibly-argued alterna¬
tives to choose. One, since society seems corrupt, is to seek to avoid the
center of it by retreating to an idyllic existence that minimizes involve¬
ment with the system (with the "system” that makes such withdrawal
possible) . Then there is the assumption that since the effort to reform
existing institutions has not brought instant perfection, the remedy is to
destroy them completely so that fresh new perfect ones can grow. Not
much thought seems to be given to the problem of where the new seed
will come from or who the gardener to tend them will be. The concept
of the servant-leader stands in sharp contrast to this kind of thinking.

4

Yet it is understandable that the easier alternatives would be chosen,
especially by young people. By extending education for so many so far
into the adult years, the normal participation in society is effectively
denied when young people are ready for it. With education that is pre¬
ponderantly abstract and analytical it is no wonder that there is a pre¬
occupation with criticism and that not much thought is given to "what
can /do about it?"

Criticism has its place; but as a total preoccupation it is sterile. In
a time of crisis, like the leadership crisis we are now in, if too many
potential builders are taken in by a complete absorption with dissecting
the wrong and by a zeal for instant perfection, then the movement so
many of us want to see will be set back. The danger, perhaps, is to hear
the analyst too much and the artist too little.

Albert Camus stands apart from other great artists of his time, in
my view, and deserves the title of prophet } because of his unrelenting
demand that each of us confront the exacting terms of his own existence,
and, like Sisyphus, accept his rock and find his happiness in dealing with
it. Camus sums up the relevance of his position to our concern for the
servant as leader in the last paragraph of his last published lecture,
entitled Create Dangerously .

One may long, as I do, for a gentler flame, a respite, a pause
for musing. But perhaps there is no other peace for the artist than
what he finds in the heat of combat "Every wall is a door, Emerson
correctly said. Let us not look for the door, and the way out, any¬
where but in the wall against which we are living. Instead, let us
seek the respite where it is — in the very thick of battle. For in my
opinion, and this is where I shall close, it is there. Great ideas, it
has been said, come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps,
then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear, amid the uproar of
empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirring
of life and hope. Some will say that this hope lies in a nation, others,
in a man. I believe rather that it is awakened, revived, nourished
by millions of solitary individuals whose deeds and works every day
negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history. As a result,
there shines forth fleetingly the ever-threatened truth that each and

5

every man, on the foundations of his own sufferings and joys, builds
for them all.

One is asked, then, to accept the human condition, its sufferings
and its joys, and to work with its imperfections as the foundation upon
which the individual will build his wholeness through adventurous
creative achievement. For the person with creative potential there is no
wholeness except in using it. And, as Camus explained, the going is
rough and the respite is brief. It is significant that he would title his
last university lecture Create Dangerously. And as I ponder the fusing
of servant and leader it seems a dangerous creation: dangerous for the
natural servant to become a leader, dangerous for the leader to be servant
first, and dangerous for a follower to insist that he be led by a servant.
There are safer and easier alternatives available to all three. But why
take them?

As I respond to the challenge of dealing with this question in the
ensuing discourse I am faced with two problems:

First: I did not get the notion of the servant as leader from conscious
logic. Rather it came to me as an intuitive insight as I contemplated Leo.
And I do not see what is relevant from my own searching and experience
in terms of a logical progression from premise to conclusion. Rather I see
it as fragments of data to be fed into my internal computer from which
intuitive insights come. Serving and leading are still mostly intuition-
based concepts in my thinking.

The second problem, and related to the first, is that, just as there
may be a real contradiction in the servant as leader, so my perceptual
world is full of contradictions. Some examples: I believe in order, and
I want creation out of chaos. My good society will have strong individ¬
ualism amidst community. It will have elitism along with populism. I
listen to the old and to the young and find myself baffled and heartened
by both. Reason and intuition, each in its own way, both comfort and
dismay me. And many more. Yet, with all of this, I believe that I live
with as much serenity as do my contemporaries who venture into con¬
troversy as freely as I do but whose natural bent is to tie up the essen¬
tials of life in neat bundles of logic and consistency. But I am deeply
grateful to the people who are logical and consistent because some of

6

them, out of their natures, render invaluable services for which I am
not capable.

My resolution of these two problems is to offer the relevant
gleanings of my experience in the form of a series of unconnected little
essays, some developed more fully than others, with the suggestion that
they be read and pondered on separately within the context of this
opening section.

Who is the Servant-Leader?

The servant-leader is servant first — as Leo was portrayed. It begins
with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then
conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. He is sharply different
from the person who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to as¬
suage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions. For
such it will be a later choice to serve — after leadership is established.
The leader-first and the servant-first are two extreme types. Between
them there are shadings and blends that are part of the infinite variety
of human nature.

The difference manifests itself in the care taken by the servant-first
to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served.
The best test, and difficult to administer, is: do those served grow as
persons; do they, while being served } become healthier, wiser, freer,
more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And ,
what is the effect on the least privileged in society; will he benefit, or,
at least, will he not be further deprived ?

As one sets out to serve, how can one know that this will be the
result? This is part of the human dilemma; one cannot know for sure.
One must, after some study and experience, hypothesize — but leave
the hypothesis under a shadow of doubt. Then one acts on the hypothesis
and examines the result. One continues to study and learn and period¬
ically one re-examines the hypothesis itself.

Finally, one chooses again. Perhaps one chooses the same hypothesis
again and again. But it is always a fresh open choice. And it is always
an hypothesis under a shadow of doubt. " Faith is the choice of the nobler
hypothesis.” Not the noblest , one never knows what that is. But the

7

nobler, the best one can see when the choice is made. Since the test of
results of one s actions is usually long delayed, the faith that sustains the
choice of the nobler hypothesis is psychological self-insight. This is
the most dependable part of the true servant.

The natural servant, the person who is servant first, is more likely
to persevere and refine his hypothesis on what serves another’s highest
priority needs than is the person who is leader first and who later serves
out of promptings of conscience or in conformity with normative
expectations.

My hope for the future rests in part on my belief that among the
legions of deprived and unsophisticated people are many true servants
who will lead, and that most of them can learn to discriminate among
those who presume to serve them and identify the true servants.

Everything Begins with the Initiative of an Individual

The forces for good and evil in the world are propelled by the
thoughts, attitudes, and actions of individual beings. What happens to
our values, and therefore to the quality of our civilization in the future,
will be shaped by the conceptions of individuals that are born of in¬
spiration. Perhaps only a few will receive this inspiration (insight)
and the rest will learn from them. The very essence of leadership, going
out ahead to show the way, derives from more than usual openness to
inspiration. Why would anybody accept the leadership of another except
that the other sees more clearly where it is best to go? Perhaps this is
the current problem: too many who presume to lead do not see more
clearly and, in defense of their inadequacy, they all the more strongly
argue that the "system” must be preserved — a fatal error in this day
of candor.

But the leader needs more than inspiration. He ventures to say,
"I will go; come with me!” He initiates, provides the ideas and the struc¬
ture, and takes the risk of failure along with the chance of success. He
says, "I will go, follow me!” when he knows that the path is uncertain,
even dangerous. And he trusts those who go with him.

Paul Goodman, speaking through a character in Making Do has
said, If there is no community for you, young man, young man, make
it yourself.”

8

What Are You Trying to Do?

What are you trying to do ? — one of the easiest to ask and most
difficult to answer of questions.

A mark of a leader, an attribute that puts him in a position to show
the way for others, is that he is better than most at pointing the direction.
As long as he is leading, he always has a goal. It may be a goal arrived
at by group consensus; or the leader, acting on inspiration, may simply
have said, ‘'Let’s go this way.” But the leader always knows what it is
and can articulate it for any who are unsure. By clearly stating and re¬
stating the goal the leader gives certainty and purpose to others who may
have difficulty in achieving it for themselves.

The word goal is used here in the special sense of the overarching
purpose, the big dream, the visionary concept, the ultimate consummation
which one approaches but never really achieves. It is something presently
out of reach; it is something to strive for, to move toward, or become.
It is so stated that it excites the imagination and challenges people to
work for something they do not yet know how to do, something they
can be proud of as they move toward it.

Every achievement starts with a goal. But not just any goal and not
just anybody stating it. The one who states the goal must elicit trust,
especially if it is a high risk or visionary goal, because those who follow
are asked to accept the risk along with the leader. A leader does not
elicit trust unless one has confidence in his values and his competence
(including judgment) and unless he has a sustaining spirit (entheos)
that will support the tenacious pursuit of a goal.

Not much happens without a dream. And for something great to
happen, there must be a great dream. Behind every great achievement
is a dreamer of great dreams. Much more than a dreamer is required to
bring it to reality; but the dream must be there first

Listening and Understanding

One of our very able leaders recently was made the head of a large,
important, and difficult-to-administer public institution. After a short time
he realized that he was not happy with the way things were going. His
approach to the problem was a bit unusual. For three months he stopped

9

reading newspapers and listening to news broadcasts; and for this period
he relied wholly upon those he met in the course of his work to tell him
what was going on. In three months his administrative problems were
resolved. No miracles were wrought; but out of a sustained intentness
of listening that was produced by this unusual decision, this able man
learned and received the insights needed to set the right course. And
he strengthened his team by so doing.

Why is there so little listening? What makes this example so
exceptional ? Part of it, I believe, with those who lead, is that the usual
leader in the face of a difficulty tends to react by trying to find someone
else on whom to pin the problem, rather than his automatic response
being, "I have a problem. What is it ? What can 1 do about my problem ?”
The sensible man who takes the later course will probably react by lis¬
tening, and somebody in the situation is likely to tell him what his prob¬
lem is and what he should do about it. Or, he will hear enough that he
will get an intuitive insight that resolves it.

I have a bias about this which suggests that only a true natural
servant automatically responds to any problem by listening first . When
he is a leader, this disposition causes him to be seen as servant first. This
su£ges!s that a non-servant' who wants to be a servant might become a
natural servant through a long arduous discipline of learning to listen, a
discipline sufficiently sustained that the automatic response to any prob¬
lem is to listen first. I have seen enough remarkable transformations in
people who have been trained to listen to have some confidence in this
approach. It is because true listening builds strength in other people.

Most of us at one time or another, some of us a good deal of the
time, would really like to communicate, really get through to a significant
level of meaning in the hearer’s experience. It can be terribly important.
The best test of whether we are communicating at this depth is to ask our¬
selves, first, are we really listening ? Are we listening to the one we want
to communicate to? Is our basic attitude, as we approach the confron¬
tation, one of wanting to understand? Remember that great line from
the prayer of St. Francis, "Lord, grant that I may not seek so much to
be understood as to understand."

One must not be afraid of a little silence. Some find silence awkward

10

or oppressive. But a relaxed approach to dialogue will include the wel¬
coming of some silence. It is often a devastating question to ask oneself,
but it is sometimes important to ask it — "In saying what I have in mind
will I really improve on the silence?”

Language and Imagination

Alfred North Whitehead once said, "No language can be anything
but elliptical, requiring a leap of imagination to understand its meaning
in its relevance to immediate experience.” Nothing is meaningful until
it is related to the hearer’s own experience. One may hear the words, one
may even remember them and repeat them, as a computer does in the
retrieval process. But meaning, a growth in experience as a result of
receiving the communication, requires that the hearer supply the im¬
aginative link from the listener’s fund of experience to the abstract
language symbols the speaker has used. As a leader (including teacher,
coach, adminstrator) one must have facility in tempting the hearer into
that leap of imagination that connects the verbal concept to the hearer’s
own experience. The limitation on language, to the communicator, is
that the hearer must make that leap of imagination. One of the arts of
communicating is to say just enough to facilitate that leap. Many attempts
to communicate are nullified by saying too much.

The physicist and philosopher Percy Bridgman takes another view
of it when he says, "No linguistic structure is capable of reproducing
the full complexity of experience .... The only feasible way of dealing
with this is to push a particular verbal line of attack as far as it can go,
and then switch to another verbal level which we might abandon when
we have to ... . Many people . . . insist on a single self-consistent verbal
scheme into which they try to force all experience. In doing this they
create a purely verbal world in which they can live a pretty autonomous
existence, fortified by the ability of many of their fellows to live in the
same verbal world.” This, of course, is what makes a cult — a group of
people who thus isolate themselves from the evolving mainstream. By
staying within their own closed verbal world they forfeit the opportunity
to lead others. One of the great tragedies is when a proven able leader
becomes trapped in one of these closed verbal worlds and loses his
ability to lead.

11

Withdrawal — Finding One’s Optimum

People who go for leadership (whether they are servants or non¬
servants) may be viewed as one of two extreme types. There are those
who are so constituted physically and emotionally that they like pressure
— seek it out — and they perform best when they are totally intense.
And there are those who do not like pressure, do not thrive under it,
but who want to lead and are willing to endure the pressure in order
to have the opportunity. The former welcome a happy exhaustion and
the latter are constantly in defense against that state. For both the art
of withdrawal is useful. To the former it is a change of pace; to the
latter it is a defense against an unpleasant state. The former may be
more the natural leader; the latter needs a tactic to survive. The art
of withdrawal serves them both.

The ability to withdraw and reorient oneself, if only for a moment,
presumes that one has learned the art of systematic neglect, to sort out
the more important from the less important — and the important from
the urgent — and attend to the more important, even though there may
be penalties and censure for the neglect of something else. One may
govern one’s life by the law of the optimum (optimum being that pace
and set of choices that give one the best performance over a lifespan) —
bearing in mind that there are always emergencies and the optimum
includes carrying an unused reserve of energy in all periods of normal
demand so that one has the resilience to cope with the emergency.

Pacing oneself by appropriate withdrawal is one of the best ap¬
proaches to making optimal use of one’s resources. The servant-as-leader
must constantly ask himself, how can I use myself to serve best?

Acceptance and Empathy

These are two interesting words, acceptance and empathy. If we
can take one dictionary’s definition: acceptance is receiving what is
offered, with approbation, satisfaction, or acquiescence; and empathy
is the imaginative projection of one’s own consciousness into another
being. The opposite of both, the word reject, is to refuse to hear or
receive — to throw out.

The servant always accepts and empathizes, never rejects. The
servant as leader always empathizes, always accepts the person but some-

12

times refuses to accept some of the person’s effort or performance as
good enough.

A college president once said, "An educator may be rejected by
his students and he must not object to this. But he may never, under any
circumstances, regardless of what they do, reject a single student.”

We have known this a long time in the family. For a family to be
a family, no one can ever be rejected. Robert Frost in his poem "The
Death of the Hired Man” states the problem in a conversation on the
farmhouse porch between the farmer and his wife about the shiftless
hired man, Silas, who has come back to their place to die. The farmer
is irritated about this because Silas was lured away from his farm in
the middle of the last haying season. The wife says this is the only home
he has. They are drawn into a discussion of what a home is. The husband
gives his view:

Home is the place where when you have
to go there they have to take you in !

The wife sees it differently. What is a home ? She says,

I should have called it something you
somehow haven’t to deserve.

Because of the vagaries of human nature, the halt, the lame, half-
made creatures that we all are, the great leader (whether it is the mother
in her home or the head of a vast organization) would say what the
wife said about home in Robert Frost’s poem. The interest in and
affection for his followers which a leader has, and it is a mark of true
greatness when it is genuine, is clearly something the followers
"haven’t to deserve.” Great leaders, including "little” people, may have
gruff, demanding, uncompromising exteriors. But deep down inside the
great ones have empathy and an unqualified acceptance of the persons
of those who go with their leadership.

Acceptance of the person, though, requires a tolerance of imper¬
fection. Anybody could lead perfect people — if there were any. But
there aren’t any perfect people. And the parents who try to raise perfect
children are certain to raise neurotics.

It is part of the enigma of human nature that the "typical” person

13

— immature, stumbling, inept, lazy — is capable of great dedication
and heroism if he is wisely led. Many otherwise able people are disquali¬
fied to lead because they cannot work with and through the half-people
who are all there are. The secret of institution building is to be able
to weld a team of such people by lifting them up to grow taller than
they would otherwise be.

Men grow taller when those who lead them empathize and when
they are accepted for what they are, even though their performance
may be judged critically in terms of what they are capable of doing.
Leaders who empathize and who fully accept those who go with them
on this basis are more likely to be trusted.

Know the Unknowable — Beyond Conscious Rationality

The requirements of leadership impose some intellectual demands
that are not measured by academic intelligence ratings. They are
not mutually exclusive but they are different things. The leader needs
two intellectual abilities that are usually not formally assessed in an
academic way: he needs to have a sense for the unknowable and be able
to foresee the unforeseeable. The leader knows some things and foresees
some things which those he is presuming to lead do not know or foresee
as clearly. This is partly what gives the leader his "lead,” what puts
him out ahead and qualifies him to show the way.

Until quite recently many would attribute these qualities of knowing
the unknowable and foreseeing the unforeseeable to mystical or super¬
natural gifts. And some still do. Now it is possible at least to speculate
about them within a framework of natural law. The electrical body-
field theory suggests the possibility of an interconnection between fields
and could explain telepathy. Some are willing to explore the possibility
of memory traces being physical entities, thus providing a basis for ex¬
plaining clairvoyance. In far-out theorizing, every mind, at the uncon¬
scious level, has access to every "bit” of information that is or ever was.
Those among us who seem to have unusual access to these "data banks”
are called "sensitives.” What we now call intuitive insight may be the
survivor of an earlier and greater sensitivity. Much of this is highly
speculative but it is inside the bounds of what some scientific minds
are willing to ponder within the framework of what is known about

14

natural phenomena. Information recall under hypnosis is suggestive
of what is potentially available from the unconscious.

What is the relevance of this somewhat fanciful theory to the issue
at hand, the thought processes of a leader? One contemporary student
of decision making put it this way: "If, on a practical decision in the
world of affairs, you are waiting for all of the information for a good
decision, it never comes.” There always is more information, sometimes
a great deal more, that one might have if one waited longer or worked
harder to get it — but the delay and the cost are not warranted. On an
important decision one rarely has 100% of the information needed
for a good decision no matter how much one spends or how long one
waits. And, if one waits too long, he has a different problem and has
to start all over. This is the terrible dilemma of the hesitant decision
maker.

As a practical matter, on most important decisions there is an in¬
formation gap. There usually is an information gap between the
solid information in hand and what is needed. The art of leadership
rests, in part, on the ability to bridge that gap by intuition, that is, a
judgment from the unconscious process. The person who is better at
this than most is likely to emerge the leader because he contributes some¬
thing of great value. Others will depend on him to go out ahead and
show the way because his judgment will be better than most. Leaders,
therefore, must be more creative than most; and creativity is largely
discovery, a push into the uncharted and the unknown. Every once in
a while a leader finds himself needing to think like a scientist, an artist,
or a poet. And his thought processes may be just as fanciful as theirs —
and as fallible.

Intuition is a feel for patterns, the ability to generalize based on
what has happened previously. The wise leader knows when to bet on
these intuitive leads, but he always knows that he is betting on per¬
centages — his hunches are not seen as eternal truths.

Two separate "anxiety” processes may be involved in a leader’s
intuitive decision, an important aspect of which is timing, the decision
to decide. One is the anxiety of holding the decision until as much in¬
formation as possible is in. The other is the anxiety of making the decision

15

when there really isn’t enough information — which, on critical decisions,
is usually the case. All of this is complicated by pressures building up
from those who "want an answer.” Again, trust is at the root of it. Has
the leader a really good information base (both hard data and sensitivity
to feelings and needs of people) and a reputation for consistently good
decisions that people respect ? Can he de-fuse the anxiety of other people
who want more certainty than exists in the situation ? /

Intuition in a leader is more valued, and therefore more trusted, at
the conceptual level. An intuitive answer to an immediate situation can
be a gimmick and conceptually defective. Overarching conceptual in¬
sight that gives a sounder framework for decisions (so important, for
instance, in foreign policy) is the greater gift.

Foresight — The Central Ethic of Leadership

The common assumption about the word "now” is that it is this
instant moment of clock time — now. In usage, we qualify this a little
by saying right now, meaning this instant, or about now, allowing a little
leeway. Sometimes we say, "I’m going to do it now,” meaning "I’m
going to start soon and do it in the near future,” or "I have just now
done it,” meaning that I did it in the recent past. The dictionary admits
all of these variations of usage.

Let us liken "now” to the spread of light from a narrowly focused
beam. There is a bright intense center, this moment of clock time, and
a diminishing intensity, theoretically out to infinity on either side. As
viewed here, now includes all of this — all of history and all of the
future. As one approaches the central focus, the light intensifies as this
moment of clock time is approached. All of it is now but some parts
are more now than others, and the central focus which marks this instant
of clock time moves along as the clock ticks. This is not the way it is!
It is simply an analogy to suggest a way of looking at now for those
who wish better to see the unforeseeable — a mark of a leader.

Prescience, or foresight, is a better than average guess about what
is going to happen when in the future. It begins with a state of mind
about now, something like that suggested by the light analogy. What
we note in the present moment of clock time is merely the intense focus
that is connected with what has gone on in the past and what will happen

16

in the future. The prescient man has a sort of "moving average” mentality
(to borrow a statistician's term) in which past, present, and future are
one, bracketed together and moving along as the clock ticks. The process
is continuous.

Machiavelli, writing 300 years ago about how to be a prince, put
it this way. "Thus it happens in matters of state; for knowing afar off
(which it is only given a prudent man to do) the evils that are brewing,
they are easily cured. But when, for want of such knowledge, they are
allowed to grow so that everyone can recognize them, there is no longer
any remedy to be found.”

The shape of some future events can be calculated from trend
data. But, as with a practical decision mentioned earlier, there is usually
an information gap that has to be bridged, and one must cultivate the
conditions that favor intuition. This is what Machiavelli meant when he
said that "knowing afar off” — which is only given a prudent man to
do. The prudent man is he who constantly thinks of "now” as the moving
concept in which past, present moment, and future are one organic
unity. And this requires living by a sort of rhythm that encourages a
high level of intuitive insight about the whole gamut of events from the
indefinite past, through the present moment, to the indefinite future. One
is at once, in every moment of time, historian, contemporary analyst, and
prophet — not three separate roles. This is what the practicing leader
is, every day of his life.

Living this way is partly a matter of faith. Stress is a condition of
most of modern life, and if one is a servant-leader and carrying the
burdens of other people — going out ahead to show the way, one takes
the rough and tumble (and it really is rough and tumble in some leader
roles) , one takes this in the belief that, if one enters a situation prepared
with the necessary experience and knowledge at the conscious level, in
the situation the intuitive insight necessary for one's optimal perform¬
ance will be forthcoming. Is there any other way, in the turbulent world
of affairs (including the typical home) , for one to maintain serenity in
the face of uncertainty? One follows the steps of the creative process
which require that one stay with conscious analysis as far as it will
carry him, and then withdraw, release the analytical pressure, if only
for a moment, in full confidence that a resolving insight will come.

17

The concern with the past and future is gradually attenuated as this
span of concern goes forward or backward from the instant moment.
The ability to do this is the essential structural dynamic of leadership.

Foresight is seen as a wholly rational process, the product of a
constantly running internal computer that deals with intersecting series
and random inputs and is vastly more complicated than anything tech¬
nology has yet produced. Foresight means regarding the events of the
instant moment and constantly comparing them with a series of pro¬
jections made in the past and at the same time projecting future events
— with diminishing certainty as projected time runs out into the in¬
definite future.

The failure (or refusal) of a leader to foresee may be viewed as
an ethical failure; because a serious ethical compromise today (when the
usual judgment on ethical inadequacy is made) is sometimes the result
of a failure to make the effort at an earlier date to foresee today’s events
and take the right actions when there was freedom for initiative to act.
The action which society labels "unethical” in the present moment is
often really one of no choice. By this standard a lot of guilty people are
walking around with an air of innocence that they would not have if
society were able always to pin the label "unethical” on the failure to
foresee and the consequent failure to act constructively when there was
freedom to act.

Foresight is the "lead” that the leader has. Once he loses this lead
and events start to force his hand, he is leader in name only. He is not
leading; he is reacting to immediate events and he probably will not long
be a leader. There are abundant current examples of loss of leadership
which stems from a failure to foresee what reasonably could have been
foreseen, and from failure to act on that knowledge while the leader had
freedom to act.

There is a wealth of experience available on how to achieve this
perspective of foresight, but only one aspect is mentioned here. Required
is that one live a sort of schizoid life. One is always at two levels of con¬
sciousness: one is in the real world — concerned, responsible, effective,
value oriented. One is also detached, riding above it, seeing today’s
events, and seeing oneself deeply involved in today’s events, in the per¬
spective of a long sweep of history and projected into the indefinite

18

future. Such a split enables one better to foresee the unforeseeable. Also,
from one level of consciousness, each of us acts resolutely from moment
to moment on a set of assumptions that then govern his life. Simul¬
taneously, from another level, the adequacy of these assumptions is
examined, in action, with the aim of future revision and improvement.
Such a view gives one the perspective that makes it possible for him to
live and act in the real world with a clearer conscience.

Awareness and Perception

Framing all of this is awareness, opening wide the doors of per¬
ception so as to enable one to get more of what is available of sensory
experience and other signals from the environment than people usually
take in. Awareness has its risks, but it makes life more interesting; cer¬
tainly it strengthens one’s effectiveness as a leader. When one is aware,
there is more than the usual alertness, more intense contact with the im¬
mediate situation, and more is stored away in the unconscious computer
to produce intuitive insights in the future when needed.

William Blake has said, “If the doors of perception were cleansed,
everything will appear to man as it is, infinite.” Those who have gotten
their doors of perception open wide enough often enough know that
this statement of Blake’s is not mere poetic exaggeration. Most of us
move about with very narrow perception — sight, sound, smell, tactile
— and we miss most of the grandeur that is in the minutest thing, the
smallest experience. We also miss leadership opportunities. There is
danger, however. Some people cannot take what they see when the doors
of perception are open too wide, and they had better test their tolerance
for awareness gradually. A qualification for leadership is that one can
tolerate a sustained wide span of awareness so that he better "sees it as
it is.”

The opening of awareness stocks both the conscious and unconscious
minds with a richness of resources for future need. But it does more than
that: it is value building and value clarifying and it armors one to meet
the stress of life by helping build serenity in the face of stress and un¬
certainty. The cultivation of awareness gives one the basis for detach¬
ment, the ability to stand aside and see oneself in perspective in the
context of one’s own experience, amidst the ever present dangers, threats.

19

and alarms. Then one sees one’s own peculiar assortment of obligations
and responsibilities in a way that permits one to sort out the urgent from
the important and perhaps deal with the important. Awareness is not
a giver of solace — it is just the opposite. It is a disturber and an
awakener. Able leaders are usually sharply awake and reasonably
disturbed. They are not seekers after solace. They have their own inner
serenity.

A leader must have more of an armor of confidence in facing the
unknown — more than those who accept his leadership. This is partly
anticipation and preparation, but it is also a very firm belief that in the
stress of real life situations one can compose oneself in a way that per¬
mits the creative process to operate.

This is told dramatically in one of the great stories of the human
spirit — the story of Jesus when confronted with the woman taken in
adultery. In this story Jesus is seen as a man, like all of us, with extraor¬
dinary prophetic insight of the kind we all have some of. He is a
leader; he has a goal — to bring more compassion into the lives of people.

In this scene the woman is cast down before him by the mob that is
challenging Jesus’s leadership. They cry, "The law says she shall be
stoned, what do you say?” Jesus must make a decision, he must give the
right answer, right in the situation, and one that sustains his leadership
toward his goal. The situation is deliberately stressed by his challengers.
What does he do?

He sits there writing in the sand — a withdrawal device. In the
pressure of the moment, having assessed the situation rationally, he
assumes the attitude of withdrawal that will allow creative insight to
function.

He could have taken another course; he could have regaled the
mob with rational arguments about the superiority of compassion over
torture. A good logical argument can be made for it. What would the
result have been had he taken that course ?

He did not choose to do that. He chose instead to withdraw and cut
the stress — right in the event itself — in order to open his awareness
to creative insight. And a great one came, one that has kept the story
of the incident alive for 2,000 years — "Let him that is without sin
among you cast the first stone.”

20

Persuasion — Sometimes One Man at a Time

Leaders work in wondrous ways. Some assume great institutional
burdens, others quietly deal with one man at a time. Such a man was
John Woolman, an American Quaker, who lived through the middle
years of the eighteenth century. He is known to the world of scholarship
for his journal, a literary classic. But in the area of our interest, leader¬
ship, he is the man who almost singlehandedly rid the Society of Friends
(Quakers) of slaves.

It is difficult now to imagine the Quakers as slaveholders, as indeed
it is difficult now to imagine anyone being a slaveholder. One wonders
how the society of 200 years hence will view "what man has made of
man” in our generation. It is a disturbing thought.

But many of the eighteenth century American Quakers were affluent,
conservative slaveholders and John Woolman, as a young man, set his
goal to rid his beloved Society of this terrible practice. Thirty of his adult
years (he lived to age 52) were largely devoted to this. By 1770, nearly
100 years before the Civil War, no Quakers held slaves.

His method was unique. He didn’t raise a big storm about it or start
a protest movement. His method was one of gentle but clear and per¬
sistent persuasion.

Although John Woolman was not a strong man physically, he ac¬
complished his mission by journeys up and down the East Coast by foot
or horseback visiting slaveholders — over a period of many years. The
approach was not to censure the slaveholders in a way that drew their
animosity. Rather the burden of his approach was to raise questions:
What does the owning of slaves do to you as a moral person? What
kind of an institution are you binding over to your children? Man by
man, inch by inch, by persistently returning and revisiting and pressing
his gentle argument over a period of thirty years, the scourge of slavery
was eliminated from this Society, the first religious group in America
formally to denounce and forbid slavery among its members. One
wonders what would have been the result if there had been fifty John
Woolmans, or even five, traveling the length and breadth of the Colonies
in the eighteenth century persuading people one by one with gentle non-
judgmental argument that a wrong should be righted by individual

21

voluntary action. Perhaps we would not have had the war with i ts 600,000
casualties and the impoverishment of the South, and with the resultant
vexing social problem that is at fever heat 100 years later with no end
in sight. We know now, in the perspective of history, that just a slight
alleviation of the tension in the 1850’s might have avoided the war. A
few John Woolmans, just a few, might have made the difference. Leader¬
ship by persuasion has the virtue of change by convincement rather than
coercion. Its advantages are obvious.

John Woolman exerted his leadership in an age that must have
looked as dark to him as ours does to us today. We may easily write
off his effort as a suggestion for today on the assumption that the Quakers
were ethically conditioned for this approach. All men are so conditioned,
to some extent — enough to gamble on.

One Action at a Time — The Way Some Great Things Get Done

Two things about Thomas Jefferson are of special interest here. First
as a young man he had the good fortune to find a mentor, George Wythe,
a Williamsburg lawyer whose original house still stands in the restored
village. George Wythe was a substantial man of his times, a signer of
the Declaration of Independence and a member of the Constitutional
Convention. But his chief claim to fame is as Thomas Jefferson’s mentor.
It was probably the influence of mentor on understudy, as Jefferson
studied law in Wythe’s office, that moved Jefferson toward his place in
history and somewhat away from his natural disposition to settle down
at Monticello as an eccentric Virginia scholar (which he remained,
partly, despite Wythe’s influence). The point of mentioning George
Wythe is that old people may have a part to play in helping the potential
servant-as-leader to emerge at his optimal best.

Perhaps the most significant aspect of Jefferson, more important in
history than the Declaration of Independence or his later term as
President, was what he did during the war. With the publication of the
Declaration the war was on and Jefferson was famous. He was im¬
portuned on all sides to take important roles in the war. But he turned
them all down. He knew who he was and he was resolved to be his own
man. He chose his own role. He went back to Virginia and didn’t leave
the state for the duration of the war.

22

Jefferson believed the war would be won by the Colonies, that there
would be a new nation, and that that nation would need a new system of
law to set it on the course that he had dreamed for it in the Declaration
of Independence. So he went back to Monticello, got himself elected to
the Virginia legislature, and proceeded to write new statutes embodying
the new principles of law for the new nation. He set out, against the
determined opposition of his conservative colleagues, to get these enacted
into Virginia law. It was an uphill fight. He would go to Williamsburg
and wrestle with his colleagues until he was slowed to a halt. Then he
would get on his horse and ride back to Monticello to rekindle his spirit
and write some more statutes. Armed with these he would return to
Williamsburg and take another run at it. He wrote 1 50 statutes in that
period and got 50 of them enacted into law, the most notable being
separation of church and state. For many years Virginia legislators were
digging into the remaining 100 as new urgent problems made their
consideration advisable.

When the Constitution was drafted some years later Jefferson wasn’t
even around; he was in France as our Ambassador. He didn’t have to be
around. He had done his work and made his contribution in the statutes
already operating in Virginia. Such are the wondrous ways in which
leaders do their work — when they know who they are and resolve to
be their own men and will accept making their way to their goal by one
action at a time, with a lot of frustration along the way.

Conceptualizing — The Prime Leadership Talent

Nikolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig, whose adult life was the first
three-quarters of the nineteenth century, is known as the Father of the
Danish Folk High Schools. To understand the significance of the Folk
High School one needs to know a little of the unique history of Denmark.
Since it is a tiny country, not many outside it know this history and con¬
sequently Grundtvig and his seminal contribution are little known. A
great church dedicated to his memory in Copenhagen attests the Danish
awareness of what he did for them.

At the beginning of the 19th century Denmark was a feudal and
absolute monarchy. It was predominantly agricultural, with a large
peasant population of serfs who were attached to manors. Early in the

23

century reforms began which gave the land to the peasants as individual
holdings. Later the first steps toward representative government were
taken.

A chronicler of those times reports, "The Danish peasantry at the
beginning of the nineteenth century was an underclass. In sullen resigna¬
tion it spent its life in dependence on estate owners and government
officials. It was without culture and technical skill, and it was seldom
able to rise above the level of bare existence. The agricultural reforms
of that time were carried through without the support of the peasants,
who did not even understand the meaning of them. . . . All the reforms
were made for the sake of the peasant, but not by him. In the course of
the century this underclass has been changed into a well-to-do middle
class which, politically and socially, now takes the lead among the
Danish people.”

Freedom — to own land and to vote — was not enough to bring
about these changes. A new form of education was designed by Grundtvig
explicitly to achieve this transformation. Grundtvig was a theologian,
poet, and student of history. Although he himself was a scholar, he
believed in the active practical life and he conceptualized a school, the
Folk High School, as a short intensive residence course for young adults
dealing with the history, mythology, and poetry of the Danish people.
He addressed himself to the masses rather than to the cultured. The
“cultured” at the time thought him to be a confused visionary and con¬
temptuously turned their backs on him. But the peasants heard him, and
their natural leaders responded to his call to start the Folk High Schools
— with their own resources.

"The spirit (not knowledge) is power.” "The living word in the
mother tongue.” "Real life is the final test,” as contrasted with the
German and Danish tendency to theorize. These were some of the
maxims that guided the new schools of the people. For fifty years of his
long life Grundtvig vigorously and passionately advocated these new
schools as the means whereby the peasants could raise themselves into
the Danish national culture. And, stimulated by the Folk High School
experience, the peasant youth began to attend agricultural schools and
to build cooperatives on the model borrowed from England.

Two events provided the challenge that matured the new peasant

24

movement and brought it into political and social dominance by the end
of the century. There was a disastrous war with Prussia in 1864, which
resulted in a substantial loss of territory and a crushing blow to national
aspiration. And then, a little later, there was the loss of world markets
for corn, their major exportable crop, as a result of the agricultural
abundance of the New World.

Peasant initiative, growing out of the spiritual dynamic generated
by the Folk High Schools, recovered the nation from both of these shocks
by transforming their exportable surplus from corn to "butter and bacon,”
by rebuilding the national spirit, and by nourishing the Danish tradition
in the territory lost to Germany during the long years until it was returned
after World War I.

All of this, a truly remarkable social, political, and economic trans¬
formation, stemmed from one man’s conceptual leadership. Grundtvig
himself did not found or operate a Folk High School, although he
lectured widely in them. What he gave was his love for the peasants, his
clear vision of what they must do for themselves, his long articulate
dedication — some of it through very barren years, and his passionately
communicated faith in the worth of these people and their strength to
raise themselves — if only their spirit could be aroused. It is a great
story of the supremacy of the spirit.

And Now!

These three examples from previous centuries illustrate very dif¬
ferent types of leadership for the common good. They are not suggested
as general models for today, although some useful hints may be found
in them. What these examples tell us is that the leadership of trail blazers
like Woolman, Jefferson, and Grundtvig is so "situational” that it rarely
draws on known models. Rather it seems to be a fresh creative response
to here-and-now opportunities. Too much concern with how others did
it may be inhibitive. One wonders, in these kaleidoscopic times, what
kind of contemporary leadership effort will be seen as seminal one
hundred years from now, as we can now see the three I have described.
Let me speculate.

The signs of the times suggest that, to future historians, the next
thirty years will be marked as the period when the dark skinned and the

25

deprived and the alienated of the world effectively asserted their claims
to stature. And that they were not led by a privileged elite (like Wool-
man, Jefferson, and Grundtvig) but by exceptional people from their
own kind.

It may be that the best that some of today’s privileged can do is to
stand aside and serve by helping when asked and as instructed. Even the
conceptualizing may be done better, not by an elite as Grundtvig did it
in his times, but by leaders from among the dark skinned, the alienated,
and the deprived of the world. A possible role for those who are now
favored by the old rules may be, as Miguel Serrano has said, that of
diving under this big wave and taking with them the accumulated wis¬
dom as they see it, in the hope of coming up on the other side prepared
to make it available when the turbulence of these times has passed and
the dark skinned and the deprived and the alienated have found their
way and can freely choose that which they find useful from what the
now-privileged have stored away. Not many of today’s privileged may
elect this course. But those among them who see themselves as servants
first may want to consider it as a possible best course for them.

I do not have the prescience to know what will come of all of this.
And I am not predicting a golden age, not soon. But I do believe that
some of those of today’s privileged who will live into the twenty-first
century will find it interesting if they can abandon their present notions of
how they can best serve their less favored neighbor and wait and listen
until the less favored find their own enlightenment, then define their
needs in their own way and, finally, state clearly how they want to be
served. The now-privileged who are natural servants may in this process
get a fresh perspective on the priority of other’s needs and thus they may
again be able to serve by leading. In the meantime, Paulo-Freire has
offered the Pedagogy of the Oppressed to ponder while they heed John
Milton’s advice, "They also serve who only stand and wait.”

For those of today’s privileged who feel more like joining the fray
and serving and leading actively as best they can during what promises
to be a long period of unusual turbulence, Woolman, Jefferson, and
Gruntvig are suggested as models to be studied closely. Study them not
to copy the details of their methods but as examples of highly creative
men, each of whom invented a role that was uniquely appropriate for

26

himself as an individual, that drew heavily on his strengths and de¬
manded little that was unnatural for him, and that was very right for
the time and place he happened to be.

Healing and Serving

Twelve ministers and theologians of all faiths and twelve psychia¬
trists of all faiths had convened for a two-day off-the-record seminar on
the one-word theme of healing . The Chairman, a psychiatrist, opened the
seminar with this question, "We are all healers, whether we are ministers
or doctors. Why are we in this business ? What is our motivation ?” There
followed only ten minutes of intense discussion and they were all agreed,
doctors and ministers, Catholics, Jews, and Protestants. "For our own
healing/’ they said.

This is an interesting word, healing, with its meaning, "to make
whole. The example above suggests that one really never makes it It
is always something sought. Perhaps, as with the minister and the doctor,
the servant-leader might also acknowledge that his own healing is his
motivation. There is something subtle communicated to one who is being
served and led if, implicit in the compact between servant-leader and led,
is the understanding that the search for wholeness is something they
share.

Alcoholics Anonymous is regarded by some who know as recover-
ing more alcoholics from this dreadful illness than all other approaches
combined. Legend has it that the founding meeting to incorporate the
organization was held in the office of a noted philanthropist, a very
wealthy man. In the course of the discussion of the principles that would
guide the new organization, the philanthropist made a statement some¬
thing like this: "From my experience I think I know about the things
that can be done with money and the things that cannot be done with
money. What you in A A want to do cannot be done with money. You
must be poor. You must not use money to do your work.”

There was more conversation but this advice profoundly influenced
the course of AA. The principles that have guided the work of AA over
the years were born at that meeting: they will be poor; no one but an
alcoholic can contribute money to AA’s modest budget; AA will own
no real property; the essential work of A A, one recovered (or partly

27

recovered) alcoholic helping another toward recovery, will not be done
for money.

Here are two quite different perspectives on healing and serving.
Whether professional or amateur the motive for the healing is the same,
for his own healing.

Community — The Lost Knowledge of These Times

Men once lived in communities and, in the developing world, many
still do. Human society can be much better than it is (or was) in primitive
communities. But if community itself is lost in the process of develop¬
ment, will what is put in its place survive ? At the moment there seems
to be some question. What is our experience ?

Within my memory, we once cared for orphaned children in insti¬
tutions. We have largely abandoned these institutions as not good for
children. Children need the love of a real home — in a family, a
community.

Now we realize that penal institutions, other than focusing the re¬
tributive vengeance of society and restraining anti-social actions for a
period, do very little to rehabilitate. In fact they debilitate and return
more difficult offenders to society. What to do with these people? It is
now suggested that most of them should be kept in homes, in community.

There is now the beginning of questioning of the extensive building
of hospitals. We need some hospitals for extreme cases. But much of
the recent expansion has been done for the convenience of doctors and
families, not for the good of patients — or even for the good of families.
Only community can give the healing love that is essential for health.
Besides, the skyrocketing cost of such extensive hospital care is putting
an intolerable burden on health-care systems.

The school, on which we pinned so much of our hopes for a better
society, has become too much a social-upgrading mechanism that destroys
community. Now we have the beginnings of questioning of the school
as we know it, as a specialized, separate-from-community institution. And
much of the alienation and purposelessness of our times is laid at the
door, not of education, but of the school.

We are in the process of moving away from institutional care for

28

the mentally retarded and toward small community-like homes. Recent
experience suggests that, whereas the former provide mostly custodial
care, the small community can actually lift them up, help them grow.

Now the care of old people is a special concern, because there are
so many more of them and they live so much longer. But the current trend
is to put them in retirement homes that segregate the old from normal
community. Already there is the suggestion that these are not the happy
places that were hoped for. Will retirement homes shortly be abandoned
as orphan homes were ?

As a generalization, I suggest that human service that requires love
cannot be satisfactorily dispensed by specialized institutions that exist
apart from community, that take the problem out of sight of the com¬
munity. Both those being cared for and the community suffer.

Love is an undefinable term, and its manifestations are both subtle
and infinite. But it begins, I believe, with one absolute condition: un¬
limited liability ! As soon as one’s liability for another is qualified to any
degree, love is diminished by that much.

Institutions, as we know them, are designed to limit liability for
those who serve through them. In the British tradition, corporations are
not "INC” as we know them, but "LTD” — Limited. Most of the goods
and services we now depend on will probably continue to be furnished
by such limited liability institutions. But any human service where he
who is served should be loved in the process, requires community, a face-
to-face group in which the liability of each for the other and all for one
is unlimited, or as close to it as it is possible to get. Trust and respect
are highest in this circumstance and an accepted ethic that gives strength
to all is reinforced. Where there is not community, trust, respect, ethical
behavior are difficult for the young to learn and for the old to maintain.
Living in community as one’s basic involvement will generate an ex¬
portable surplus of love which the individual may carry into his many
involvements with institutions which are usually not communities: busi¬
nesses, churches, governments, schools.

Out of the distress of our seeming community-less society, hopeful
new forms of community are emerging: young people’s communes,
Israeli kibbutzes, and theraputic communities like Synanon. Seen through

29

the bias of conventional morality, the communes are sometimes disturb¬
ing to the older generation. But among them is a genuine striving for
community, and they represent a significant new social movement which
may foretell the future.

The opportunities are tremendous for rediscovering vital lost knowl¬
edge about how to live in community while retaining as much as we can
of the value in our present urban, institution-bound society.

All that is needed to rebuild community as a viable life form for
large numbers of people is for enough servant-leaders to show the way,
not by mass movements, but by each servant-leader demonstrating his
own unlimited liability for a quite specific community-related group.

Institutions

We differ from the primitives in that it is our task to rediscover the
elementary knowledge of community while we refine and radically
improve much of the vast non-community institutional structure on which
we depend and without which we could not survive. A hopeful sign of
the times, in the sector of society where it seems least expected — highly
competitive business, people-building institutions are holding their own
while they struggle successfully in the market place. It is not a great revo¬
lutionary movement but it is there as a solid fact of these times. And it
is a very simple approach. The first order of business is to build a group
of people who, under the influence of the institution, grow taller and
become healthier, stronger, more autonomous.

Some institutions achieve distinction for a short time by the intel¬
ligent use of people; but it is not a happy achievement, and eminence,
so derived, does not last long. Others aspire to distinction (or the reduc¬
tion of problems) by embracing "gimmicks” : profit sharing, work en¬
largement, information, participation, suggestion plans, paternalism,
motivational management. Nothing wrong with these in a people¬
building institution. But in a people-using institution they are like aspirin
— sometimes stimulating and pain relieving, and they may produce an
immediate measurable improvement of sorts. But these are not the means
whereby an institution moves from people-using to people-building. In
fact, an overdose of these nostrums may seal an institution’s fate as a
people-user for a very long time.

30

An institution starts on a course toward people-building with leader¬
ship that has a firmly established context of people first. With that, the
right actions fall naturally into place. And none of the conventional
gimmicks may ever be used. (For fuller discussion of institutions see a
companion essay The Institution as Servant.)

Trustees

Institutions need two kinds of leaders: those who are inside and
carry the active day-to-day roles; and those who stand outside but are
intimately concerned and who, with the benefit of some detachment,
oversee the active leaders. These are the trustees.

The trustee is what his title implies, a person in whom ultimate trust
is placed. Because institutions inevitably harbor conflict, the trustee is
the court of last resort if an issue arises that cannot be resolved by the
active parties. If tangible assets are involved, he legally holds them and
is responsible to all interested parties for their good use. He has a prime
concern for goals and for progress toward goals. He makes his influence
felt more by knowing and asking questions than by authority, although
he usually has authority and can use it if need be. If, as is usual, there are
several trustees, their chairman has a special obligation to see that the
trustees as a group sustain a common purpose and are influential in help¬
ing the institution maintain consistent high-level performance toward
its goals. The chairman is not simply the presider over meetings, he must
serve and lead the trustees as a group and act as their major contact with
the active inside leadership. Although trustees usually leave the "making
of news” to active persons in the enterprise, theirs is an important leader¬
ship opportunity.

So conceived, the role of trustees provides an unequaled fulfillment
opportunity for those who would serve and lead. And no one step will
more quickly raise the quality of the total society than a radical recon¬
struction of trustee bodies so that they are predominantly manned by
able dedicated servant-leaders. Two disturbing questions: Is there now
enough discerning toughness strategically placed to see that this change
takes place, in the event that able, dedicated servant-leaders become
available in sufficient numbers to do it? And are enough able people
now preparing themselves for these roles so that this change can be made

31

in the event that it is possible to make it? (For a fuller discussion of the
trustee role see companion essays The Institution as Servant, and Trustees
and Their Servants.)

Power and Authority — The Strength and the Weakness

In a complex institution-centered society, which ours is likely to be
into the indefinite future, there will be large and small concentrations
of power. Sometimes it will be a servant’s power of persuasion and
example. Sometimes it will be coercive power used to dominate and
manipulate people. The difference is that, in the former, power is used
to create opportunity and alternatives so that the individual may choose
and build autonomy. In the latter the individual is coerced into a pre¬
determined path. Even if it is "good” for him, if he experiences nothing
else, ultimately his autonomy will be diminished.

Some coercive power is overt and brutal. Some is covert and subtly
manipulative. The former is open and acknowledged, the latter is insid¬
ious and hard to detect. Most of us are more coerced than we know.
We need to be more alert in order to know, and we also need to ac¬
knowledge that, in an imperfect world, authority backed up by power
is still necessary because we just don’t know a better way. We may
one day find one. It is worth searching for.

The trouble with coercive power is that it only strengthens
resistance. And, if successful, its controlling effect lasts only as long
as the force is strong. It is not organic. Only persuasion and the conse¬
quent voluntary acceptance are organic.

Since both kinds of power have been around for a long time, an
individual will be better off if at some point he is close enough to raw
coercion to know what it is. One must be close to both the bitterness
and goodness of life to be fully human.

The servant, by definition, is fully human. The servant-leader is
functionally superior because he is closer to the grpund — he hears
things, sees things, knows things, and his intuitive insight is exceptional.
Because of this he is dependable and trusted. And he knows the meaning
of that line from Shakespeare’s sonnet: "They that have power to hurt
and will do none - ”

32

How Does One Know the Servant?

For those who follow, and this is every man — including those
who lead, the really critical question is who is this moral man we would
see as leader? Who is the servant? How does one tell a truly giving,
enriching servant from the neutral person or the one whose net influence
is to take away from or diminish other people ?

A distinguished Rabbi and scholar had just concluded a lecture
on the Old Testament prophets in which he had spoken of true prophets
and false prophets. A questioner asked him how one tells the difference
between the true and the false prophets. The Rabbi’s answer was suc¬
cinct and to the point, "There is no way!” he said. Then he elaborated,
"If there were a way, if one had a gauge to slip over the head of the
prophet and establish without question that he is or he isn’t a true
prophet, there would be no human dilemma and life would have
no meaning.”

So it is with the servant issue. If there were a dependable way that
would tell us, "This man enriches by his presence, he is neutral, or he
takes away,” life would be without challenge. Yet it is terribly important
that one know, both about himself and about others, whether the net
effect of one’s influence on others enriches, is neutral, or diminishes
and depletes.

Since there is no certain way to know this, one must turn to the
artists for illumination. Such an illumination is in Herman Hesse’s
idealized portrayal of the servant Leo whose servanthood comes through
in his leadership. In stark modern terms it can also be found in the brutal
reality of the mental hospital where Ken Kesey (in One Flew Over the
Cuckoo’s Nest) gives us Big Nurse — strong, able, dedicated,
dominating, authority-ridden, manipulative, exploitative — the net
effect of whose influence diminished other people, literally destroyed
them. In the story she is pitted in a contest with tough, gutter-bred Mac-
Murphy, a patient, the net effect of whose influence is to build up people
and make both patients and the doctor in charge of the ward grow larger
as persons, stronger, healthier — an effort that ultimately costs Mac-
Murphy his life. If one will study the two characters, Leo and Mac-
Murphy, one will get a measure of the range of possibilities in the role
of servant as leader.

33

In Here, Not Out There

A king once asked Confucius’ advice on what to do about the large
number of thieves. Confucius answered, "If you, sir, were not covetous,
although you should reward them to do it, they would not steal.” This
advice places an enormous burden on those who are favored by the
rules, and it establishes how old is the notion that the servant views
any problem in the world as in here, inside himself, not out there. And
if a flaw in the world is to be remedied, to the servant the process of
change starts in here, in the servant, not out there. This is a difficult
concept for that busybody, modern man.

So it is with joy. Joy is inward, it is generated inside. It is not found
outside and brought in. It is for those who accept the world as it is,
part good, part bad, and who identify with the good by adding a little
island of serenity to it.

Herman Hesse dramatized it in the powerful leadership exerted
by Leo who ostensibly only served in menial ways but who, by the quality
of his inner life that was manifest in his presence, lifted men up and
made the journey possible. Camus, in his final testament quoted earlier,
leaves us with, "each and every man, on the foundations of his own
sufferings and joys, builds for them all.”

Who is the Enemy?

Who is the enemy? Who is holding back more rapid movement
to the better society that is reasonable and possible with available
resources ? Who is responsible for the mediocre performance of so many
of our institutions ? Who is standing in the way of a larger consensus
on the definition of the better society and paths to reaching it ?

Not evil people. Not stupid people. Not apathetic people. Not
the "system.” Not the protesters, the disrupters, the revolutionaries,
the reactionaries.

Granting that fewer evil, stupid, or apathetic people or a better
"system” might make the job easier, their removal would not change
matters, not for long. The better society will come, if it comes, with
plenty of evil, stupid, apathetic people around and with an imperfect,
ponderous, inertia-charged "system” as the vehicle for change. Liquidate
the offending people, radically alter or destroy the system, and in less

34

than a generation they will all be back. It is not in the nature of things
that a society can be cleaned up once and for all according to an ideal
plan. And even if it were possible, who would want to live in an asceptic
world? Evil, stupidity, apathy, the "system” are not the enemy even
though society building forces will be contending with them all the time.
The healthy society, like the healthy body, is not the one that has taken
the most medicine. It is the one in which the internal health building
forces are in the best shape.

The real enemy is fuzzy thinking on the part of good, intelligent,
vital people, and their failure to lead, and to follow servants as leaders.
Too many settle for being critics and experts. There is too much intel¬
lectual wheel spinning, too much retreating into "research,” too little
preparation for and willingness to undertake the hard and high risk
tasks of building better institutions in an imperfect world, too little dis¬
position to see "the problem” as residing in here and not out there.

In short, the enemy is strong natural servants who have the potential
to lead but do not lead, or who choose to follow a non-servant. They
suffer. Society suffers. And so it may be in the future.

Implications

The future society may be just as mediocre as this one. It may be
worse. And no amount of restructuring or changing the system or tearing
it down in the hope that something better will grow will change this.
There may be a better system than the one we now know. It is hard to
know. But, whatever it is, if the people to lead it well are not there, a
better system will not produce a better society.

Many people finding their wholeness through many and varied
contributions make a good society. Here we are concerned with but one
facet: able servants with potential to lead must lead and, where appro¬
priate, they must follow only servant-leaders. Not much else counts if
this does not happen.

This brings us to that critical aspect of realism that confronts the
servant-leader, that of order. There must be some order because we know
for certain that the great majority of people will choose some kind of
order over chaos even if it is delivered by a brutal non-servant and even
if, in the process, they lose much of their freedom. Therefore the servant-

35

leader will beware of pursuing an idealistic path regardless of its impact
on order. The big question is, what kind of order? This is the great
challenge to the emerging generation of leaders: can they build
better order?

An older person who grew up in a period when values were more
settled and the future seemed more secure will be disturbed by much
he finds today. But one firm note of hope comes through — loud and
clear; we are at a turn of history in which people are growing up faster
and some extraordinarily able, mature, servant-disposed men and women
are emerging in their early and middle twenties. The percentage may
be small, and, again, it may be larger than we think. And it is not an elite;
it is all sorts of exceptional people. Most of them could be ready for
some large society-shaping responsibility by the time they are thirty if
they are encouraged to prepare for leadership as soon as their potential
as builders is identified, which is possible for many of them by age
eighteen or twenty. Preparation to lead need not be at the complete
expense of vocational or scholarly preparation, but it must be the first
priority. And it may take some difficult bending of resources and some
unusual initiative on the part of these people to accomplish all that
should be accomplished in these critical years and give leadership prep¬
aration first priority. But whatever it takes, it must be done. For a
while at least, until a better led society is assured, some other important
goals should take a subordinate place.

All of this rests on the assumption that the only way to change a
society (or just make it go) is to produce people, enough people, who
will change it (or make it go) . The urgent problems of our day, an
immoral and senseless war, destruction of the environment, poverty,
alienation, discrimination, overpopulation, are here because of human
failures; individual failures; one man at a time, one action at a
time failures.

If we make it out of all of this (and this is written in the belief
that we will make it), the "system" will be whatever works best. The
builders will find the useful pieces wherever they are, invent new ones
when needed, all without reference to idealogical coloration. "How do
we get the right things done?” will be the watchword of the day, every
day. And the context of those who bring it off will be: men (all men

36

and women who are touched by the effort) grow taller, and become
healthier, stronger, more autonomous, and more disposed to serve.

Leo the servant , and the exemplar of the servant-leader , has one
further portent for us. If we may assume that Herman Hesse is the
narrator in Journey to the East (not a difficult assumption to make) , at
the end of the story he establishes his identity. His final confrontation
at the close of his initiation into the Order is with a small transparent
sculpture, two figures joined together. One is Leo, the other is the
narrator. The narrator notes that a movement of substance is taking
place within the transparent sculpture.

.... I perceived that my image was in the process of adding to
and flowing into Leo’s, nourishing and strengthening it. It seemed
that, in time .... only one would remain: Leo. He must grow,

I must disappear.

As I stood there and looked and tried to understand what I
saw, I recalled a short conversation that I had once had with Leo
during the festive days at Bremgarten. We had talked about the
creations of poetry being more vivid and real than the poets
themselves.

What Hesse may be telling us here is that Leo is the symbolic per¬
sonification of Hesse's aspiration to serve through his literary creations,
creations that are greater than Hesse himself; and that his work, for
which he was but the channel, will carry on and serve and lead in a
way that he, a twisted and tormented man, could not — except as he
created.

Does not Hesse dramatize, in extreme form, the dilemma of us all?
Except as we venture to create, we cannot project ourselves beyond
ourselves to serve and lead.

To which Camus would add, create dangerously!

37

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

of

ROBERT K. GREENLEAF

Robert K. Greenleaf has spent most of his organizational life in the
field of management research, development and education at American
Telephone & Telegraph. Just before his retirement as Director of Man¬
agement Research there, he held a joint appointment as visiting lecturer
at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and at the Harvard Business
School. As a consultant to several major universities, businesses, founda¬
tions, and churches during the tumultuous 1960’s and ’70’s, his eclectic
and wide-ranging curiosity, reading and contemplation provided an un¬
usual background for observing these institutions. As a lifelong student
of organization, i.e., how things get done, he has distilled these obser¬
vations in a series of essays on the theme of Servant Leadership, the ob¬
jective of which is to stimulate thought and action for building a better,
more caring society.

These core essays are (1) The Servant as Leader , which describes the
key ideas, concepts and imperatives of servant leadership, (2) The Insti¬
tution as Servant , which provides a ‘ ‘primus inter pares’ ’ design for or¬
ganizing and working among the top executive structure (and reasons
for its importance as an alternative to a hierarchical, pyramidal model),
and (3) The Trustee as Servant , which lays out a challenging and provoc¬
ative role for trustees and directors, a prescription which he holds as es¬
sential if organizations are to meet reasonable standards of excellence.

Robert Greenleaf has also written a series of other essays including
Servant , Restrospect and Prospect-, The Servant as Religious Leader, and
Seminary as Servant as well as two hardcover books, SERVANT
LEADERSHIP (a collection of essays) and TEACHER AS SERVANT, all
of which extend the servant theme and show its application in different
contexts.

Now in his 80’ s, Mr. Greenleaf is working on a capstone essay, The
Servant as Nurturer of the Human Spirit, in which he explores the roots
and consequences of servanthood by examining the lives of extraordi¬
nary leaders, their own nurturing and spirit, and their enspiriting im¬
pact on the organizations and society within which they worked.

ubbary
claremont, calif